524 - Regular Session. Anti and Pro-Immigration Discourses and the Crisis of the European Project

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

Anti-immigration political movements, ranging from mainstream political parties to far right grassroots groups, have become a visible and influential presence in the European political landscape at a time of widespread economic and financial uncertainty. Anti-immigration and anti-EU sentiments are in some cases (eg. UKIP) joined up together, in others anti-immigration political movements look for EU allies and instrumentally construct ‘us & them’ narratives where ‘us’ is no longer defined by national belonging but by a sense of shared European identity. Among pro-immigration groups, shared European and/or cosmopolitan identities underpin different political genealogies and different outlooks on the crisis of the EU project as well as on the alleged death of multiculturalism as public policy and overarching political discourse able to capture the complexities of European societies.

Sub Unit

• European Integration

Session Organizer

• Nando Sigona, University of Birmingham

Individual Presentations

• Bonding or Bridging: Far Right Parties' vs Precarious Activists' Transnational Discourse about Migration in Europe - Nicole Doerr, Mount Holyoke College

• Disunion in the Union: Right-Wing Nationalism in Today's Europe - Ann M. Horwitz, University of Maryland-College Park

• Diversity Policy and Sense of Discrimination in Europe: Multiculturalism to Mainstreaming - Pamela Irving Jackson, Rhode Island College; Peter E. Doerschler, Bloomsburg University